If you use deepfreeze average joe won't know, only thing they know is if they reboot anything they changed is gone. Only time you have to disable deepfreeze and re-enable it is if you want the change to persist after reboot.
And on the new users getting on a PC without a reboot that's honestly just a rule you're going to have to impose, shut down PC after you're done, don't use PC's that aren't turned off when you get there.

Not sure about sandboxie, haven't used it, guessing the price of deepfreeze makes it not viable?

Holy smokes, just checked on the corporate pricing scheme for deep freeze >.>
Hope somebody with sandboxie knowledge comes along

This post was edited by Civill on Sep 5 2013 11:27am

If you intent to do this on Windows boxes I suggest using group policies with a control machine and clients. Clients are all booted with no users logged in. Once a customer comes in, you use the group policies admin credential to create a user account with minimal rights on one of your client machines, that you push to it from the control machine, which your staff logs on a group super user. Once the customer leaves, you log the account off and destroy it programmability from the control machine.

The whole purpose of group policies is defer admin rights to credentials provided by a network node rather than having them within the machine.

As for network booting, they had that at my college for the CS class exercises. Made me want to shoot myself. Soooo slow. Then again that was like 10 years ago, I guess it go better since then.

DeepFreeze is awesome, but crazy expensive. There are alternatives though. If I were to do this, I'd probably go the windows server route and make a domain so I could implement group policy on all the machines. Using GP, you could mimic (what used to be) Windows Steady State.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=24373

In addition to that, I'd use FOG as a deployment solution...way better than manually installing the OS, programs, and patches on all lab machines. Only catch is that you'll need machines that support booting from the nic.

There are a few freeware/FOSS alternatives to DeepFreeze, but I haven't tried any of them yet. I have heard decent reviews of Reboot Restore Rx.....google it. The big difference is that RRR requires a reboot to give you a clean OS, and DF only needs a logoff/logon.

Think steadier state is a very good option for what I'm looking for. Unless anyone has any better ideas I'm going to tip everyone who participated and call it a day

May want to look at XEN's hardware pass through. I've got a XEN hypervisor box that is identical to my desktop rig and games just as well with hardware pass through.

[URL]http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_PCI_Passthrough[/URL]